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I've been thinking about my fictional class, ENG 493: A Survey of Reading Whatever the Hell You Want. The idea's not half-bad. I'm only taking twelve credit hours, an unthinkable level of slackerness. I'm going to pretend that am taking ENG 493 and make time to do some reading, which is, after all, the best way to learn how to write. Put that way, it's not procrastination, but a proactive measure necessary to my development as a writer.

Which brings me to the rest of this update. It's another essay for Nonfiction, where I had to define a whole world using a narrow focusing device. I only had two pages, so I don't think I pulled it off, but I like some of the bits here:

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There weren’t any students for a five-seat radius at any of the lunch tables, which suited me just fine. While the other kids yammered about stupid things like Nintendo or Jonathan Taylor Thomas, I was the verge of a scientific breakthrough. It was going to be historic! Groundbreaking! I was shocked it wasn’t already on the evening news. A Roman collar floated into my peripheral vision. With typical adult incompetence, Father John took my isolation for an unlucky predicament. “What are you reading?”

I didn’t look up. “Dinotopia.” I should have stopped there. “You see, this guy was in a library and he found this journal about this father and son who crash-landed on this island where dinosaurs had survived and they had a whole civilization there and it’s all in the journal.” I flipped back through lushly illustrated pages to the beginning, where a man pulled a battered volume from a dusty bookshelf. The caption read: I find the journal. “If this is true,” I jabbered on, “it would rewrite all the science books!” This book had confirmed what I already knew to be fact: That dinosaurs, like my goldfish and Amelia Earhart, had not died at all, but had merely been misplaced and would turn up eventually, probably in a very surprising location.

Then Father John launched a torpedo into my feverish calculations. “It’s just a book,” he sighed and left. Across the room Ronny Thompson and Kevin Wheeler were chucking peas again.

~~~

Public schools and private schools are fundamentally the same. Fun of any kind is strictly prohibited. Still, nylon garland and twinkle lights weren’t overtly religious, so the principal turned a blind eye when Mrs. Robinson draped them around the backstage areas. After the bell rang and the kids shuffled out to second period, she held me back with tap to my shoulder. On an early release day, no one would care if I got to Algebra a few minutes late.

Mrs. Robinson waited a few seconds before speaking until the chatter of students in the hallway died away. “I won’t keep you long, but we’re not really supposed to exchange presents with students so…” She shrugged and produced a paperback with a bow around it. “Don’t tell anyone.”

Sheepishly, I pulled a wrapped box the size of a fist from my backpack. We swapped and I examined the contraband gift. Guilty Pleasures by Laurel K. Hamilton. On the cover a petite woman gripped a revolver in one hand, while a pale man with fangs lingered in the background. “You’ll like this one,” she said, gauging my reaction. “It’s like a film noir Buffy.” I could have hugged her. Spiky hair, a predominantly black wardrobe, and a fondness for Anne Rice had lent me an unfortunate reputation for wanting to be a vampire. Which was stupid. I read dinosaur books voraciously in the third grade, but that didn’t mean I aspired to be a Tyrannosaur. Mrs. Robinson was different. She ran a Vampire: The Masquerade game on the weekend for her friends.

I hugged her anyway.

~~~

The sun’s rising and I’m on my seventh cup of tea. I notice the clock for the first time in twelve hours. Class in an hour, and I’m on page 578. The end is so close I can taste it. I flip through the remaining pages. “Don’t let your classes get in the way of your education,” Professor Timonin had said. I open my blinds, switch off my reading lamp, and settle in. He’d understand.

~~~

My parents used to sleep in on the weekends, so around daybreak or sometimes before, I would pull a book from a shelf, settle back into bed and kill time. The arcane symbols along the bottom of the pages were gibberish, but that didn’t stop me. There were pictures.

The Pink Angel looked for the Blue Angel, but couldn’t find her. As it turned out, the Green Angel had tricked the Blue Angel into eating poisoned cookies, and now he held her prisoner in his fortress in the sky. Luckily, the Red Angel saw this happen and told the Pink Angel, so they launched a siege of the Green Angel’s fortress with the help of the Orange Angel… and so on. A different story every morning.

A couple years later, the gibberish at the bottom of the page started making sense. The Angels weren’t kidnapping or rescuing anyone. They were counting from one to ten. Lame.